Quiet Christmas

It’s been about a year since I reviewed Quiet, Please!, a pleasant little mix of puzzles and point-and-click adventures. I enjoyed it, even though it wasn’t exactly the deepest game. It was also a shorty at around thirty minutes. To this day, I still get people complaining that I didn’t give a thumbs up to City Tuesday, yet a game like Quiet, Please! got my recommendation, even though they were similar in length and style. The difference between the two is Quiet felt finished and fully realized, while City Tuesday felt like it was just starting at the moment it ended, making the overall impact of the game unsatisfactory. It would be like going to a bakery and asking for a dozen cookies, six of them the Quiet cookies and six of them the Tuesday cookies. First you’re handed the Quiet cookies, and they’re decent, if not memorable. Then you anxiously await for the Tuesday cookies, only to have the baker throw the uncooked dough at your face. And then call you a cunt for not being happy with the dough. Even if the dough was delicious (it was), you can only imagine how good the finished cookie would have been.

Extending that analogy further, Quiet Christmas is an overcooked cookie. If it had been bundled with the original as a freebie, I could have appreciated it more and probably bumped up Quiet’s standing on the leaderboard. But it’s not, and I can’t. The real problem with Quiet Christmas is it’s very much the same game, only with a small handful of new puzzles. It takes place in the same house as the original, features the same cast, and the logic of the puzzles is largely the same as before. It would be like buying a DVD for $20 and being told that you can get the alternate ending for an additional $20. No, that should have been on the DVD in the first place.

Once again, my warped brain conceived horrible things to do to my family. I figured I would grease the floor with butter to cause my hyperactive brother to slip and knock himself unconscious. Not making that up. I watch too much YouTube.

If you played the first Quiet game, you’ll breeze through this expansion. I used a stopwatch. Ten minutes, thirty-seven seconds was my time. And, because it’s the same location, there’s no surprises here for players. I think this could possibly become a series of games, but not like this. Keep the family around (I suspect the parents are both drunks and the brother is hyperactive) but send them to new, exotic locations. That works! Look at Home Alone 2. Same movie. Same plot. Same characters. Different location. $360,000,000 at the box office. By the way, I didn’t actually know how much that flick made until just now. Wow. I think I’m going to start cutting myself.

One Response to Quiet Christmas

The release date of the XBOX 720 is getting closer. As XBLIG developers, we don’t know what the future is going to be, now that Microsoft has let known that XNA is no longer under development. Therefore, it is understandable that those XBLIG developers that have a project “half-done” are going great lengths to release “what they have”, settling for any type of success as a one-last-victory before the dreaded announcement of what awaits us.

I bet that this game was supposed to be released next Christmas, most likely with a richier content. I don’t blame the developer for hurrying up, as I’m doing exactly that as well.